The Team

Milo Skywalker III

Director of Loyalty

While many SEO agency clients have felt the effect of post penguin life in the world of search engine rankings, IAcquire have been the first link building company pecked to death by the latest Arctic animal assault. After a long and detailed factual report of paid blackhat linkbuilding activities post penguin, Google has de-indexed all domain references to IAcquire from the results pages and the company has responded in the last 24 hours by removing the service from their website.

Last week, SEO Specialist Josh Davis published a large report detailing with evidence how IAcquire, even post the major Penguin changes to the Google Algorithm continued paid link building techniques for prominent companies. This report was seen and investigated by Matt Cutts, Head of Googles Web Spam Team, and was discovered to be entirely accurate at implicating the organisation. While IAcquire continue to claim that all their strategies, pre or post any Google Update, where openly transparent to their clients, the repucussions of their actions will make many SEO agencies take notice. On their official company blog they stated:

There are many methods to develop link relationships. Based on the client strategy we deploy a variety of approaches to link development, and in some cases we’ve allowed financial compensation as a tool. Removing financial compensation from the link development toolset has been a long term goal for us. We are using these recent events to be a catalyst to expedite those plans effective immediately.

So was this the huge post Penguin update to link building that everyone has been seeing on the horizon? While Davis has stated that he will not be chasing any other illegal fish, with evidence from IAcquire, Google surely must be more equipped to discover this type of linkbuilding easier than ever before? The motto to companies is to understand the basics of how your agency plans to create your links. Bring up post Penguin changes with your agency and request how your strategy is working. Agencies need to focus on quality white hat content that will be shared and work for their clients for traffic and stop tossing dimes into the wishing well.